My older daughter designs programs for her medical school class and cards for her grandmothers. As a gift to me she drew a family portrait that captures each family member’s special character.

Surrounded by this talent, about five years ago I began to draw, hoping to do it well enough that my sketches would be recognizable in my journals, especially with travel. It’s been a slow painful journey but recently I began Sketchbook Skool, online classes founded by Danny Gregory, an artist I’ve admired for years. The first class began with an intimidating assignment – draw with a pen. The purpose of the exercise is learning to “live with the line”. Multiple times in the last six weeks I began a drawing and wanted nothing more than to tear it out of the book, get rid of the line and start the sketch over. But I had to persevere and since it was an assignment I kept working with it. Amazingly, as I continued with the drawing it would take shape and become something I really liked. My mistakes were not only livable, many times they were my favorite drawings when finished.

Porch Wall Hanging

There are corollaries to be made in healthcare–perseverance for example, of which most family practice doctors need a healthy dose of every day. But the acceptance of imperfection, is that even safe in medicine? How do you accept, even more, celebrate the difficulties of practicing medicine today, especially in primary care? With drawing it’s a matter of going beyond ignoring the line–it’s using it to “bend” the reality of a picture, thereby creating something that resembles the object but is different, still recognizable but different. The corollary in my practice is helping patients become participants by using tools like social media, whiteboards and smart phone apps. But I’m an apprentice artist compared to the DaVincis of medical care: The DPC movement with physicians like Dr. Robert Lamberts, and models like Turntable Health are “bending” healthcare practice to create better care for patients, and in the doing, taking physician practice to a point where it once again feels like Art.